Piercing the Sun

This is a carving of a centaur shooting an arrow at the sun. It’s based on an astrological story of Sagitarius shooting his arrow at the sun symbolizing the soldier’s piercing the side of Jesus with a spear as he hung on the cross. I’ve put a dead tree as support to the centaur revealing the death of Jesus. You can subtly make out a human figure form at the top of the tree with a hole in its side.

This is carved in mahogany and stained with a special mix of stain colors and finished with multiple coats of polyurethane. It is signed and dated and mounted to a burl base that has the subtle shape of a fish. The base’s bottom is also felt lined. It stands near 20 inches high, 14 inches wide and 12 inches deep at the base.

The carving is actually three pieces of wood; the tree, the centaur, and the arrow. I carved the two big pieces separately as shown in the last picture. This did two things for me. 1) It facilited access to hard to reach areas at the horse’s hind quarter, and 2) Because I hate seeing glue lines in carvings, the two pieces of wood were taken from one piece of wood where I cut the two pieces to length and rotated one of them so the grain lines formed a big ‘S’ curve through the carving minimalizing the evidence of the glue line. The glue line also went through the contact point of the centaur and the tree for minimal exposure and maximum added support for the legs of the centaur where the wood grain was weakest.

This is one of those pieces that sat on the work bench, was worked on when time allowed, and finally got finished after a period of 7 years. The story of this piece and how it “was finally finished” was sent to two national wood carving publications: Chip Chats and Woodcarving Magazine. Both magazines published the story with photos and Chip Chats put its picture on the cover. So it’s well documented.

Thanks to all for the comments. Sorry I can’t respond, but something’s wierd with my page where the link to the ‘comments’ doesn’t work. I’m not being antisocial. It’s a broken link. Not sure how to fix it….Justin